CHEMICAL: Concerned for health risk

Published:06:00Sunday 14 May 2017

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I was surprised to learn that Anne-Marie Trevelyan has written to the Government asking for reassurance that glyphosphate will be re-licensed for sale in the UK, even if the EU has decided to keep the ban on its use in force.

Does she not realise that there have been concerns about its safety? The International Agency for Research on Cancer has labelled it as ‘probably causing cancer’.

The controversy regarding this conclusion is reminiscent to me of the decades-long argument concerning the relationship between smoking and cancer, which can no longer be denied.

I suggest that anyone who has suffered any form of cancer, or who knows such a sufferer and knows the consequences, would be horrified to learn that anyone is urging its use, bearing in mind that it is the basic chemical in many garden pesticides, used by countless gardeners and contractors, not always under strictly controlled conditions.

This is not an issue of ‘Britain versus the nasty EU’, as I have the impression that Mrs Trevelyan seems to think, but a matter of human health and well-being.

It is particularly ironic that people working in farming, where the use of this chemical is supported by the NFU, may well be the people most at risk.

The implication of Mrs Trevelyan’s campaign strikes me as a stark example of the sort of consequences which many fear if individuals in Britain succeed in depriving us of our membership of the EU, which protects us in so many ways, which are only just beginning to become so obvious.